Case Study- A Practical Path towards Building Strategy
- The case study method firstly adopted and most popularized by Harvard Business School is now being adopted by all the top B schools as well as the institutions which provide business strategy certification.
- During the bachelor’s degree, be it engineering, commerce or science, the concept of teaching was almost fully dependent on lectures. In contrast, management colleges and strategy institutes are spending less than half of the time on lectures.
- If someone is applying to B schools or any business strategy certification, they should better make themselves known with the concept of case studies.
- In short, we can say that case studies are means to develop the ability of making a strategy and leading towards better skill enhancement.
Relationship between Case Study and Strategy Building
- A case study represents a management problem for a specific business. It could be the real issues that the top level of the company are facing.
- The solution to these issues depend upon the strategies made that could be implemented to solve these problems.
At the first glance the sheer volume is to cut through the problems and filter out the best strategy that’s relevant for the case.
The percentage of case study dependency ranges from 20% to 80% in the top business schools as well as the institutes providing strategy planning certifications in the world. It gets varying degrees of support from the other methods of teaching such as lectures, experiential learning, group assignments etc.
Examples of Case Study:
- A case study on marketing could focus on developing the strategy for entering a new market.
- Finance case study examples could talk about evaluating the cash flows status for a company and defining a strategy to improve the accounts receivable AR (policies).
- Case Studies on operations helps in developing a strategy to take the decision to re-engineer the supply chain management system and reduce the dependency of global raw materials.
The moment of relaxation as well as increasing the efficiency starts when we move to strategy case studies, where the problems and the sustainable solutions can span across domains from marketing to operations including finances.
The best B Schools which use Case Studies
Harvard Business School | 80% |
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Western Ontario (Ivey) | 75% | |||
Virginia (Darden) | 74% |
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IESE Business School | 70% | |||
UC-Berkeley (Haas) | 50% |
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UNC (Kenan-Flagler) | 50% |
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Dartmouth (Tuck) | 45% | |||
Stanford GSB | 40% |
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Pennsylvania (Wharton) | 40% | |||
Columbia Business School | 40% | |||
Yale School of Management | 40% |
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Georgia Tech | 40% | |||
IE Business School | 40% | |||
Indiana (Kelley) | 35% |
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Texas-Austin (McCombs) | 35% |
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MIT (Sloan) | 33% |
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Duke (Fuqua) | 33% |
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Northwestern (Kellogg) | 30% |
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London Business School | 30% |
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INSEAD | 30% |
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Cornell (Johnson) | 30% |
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UCLA (Anderson) | 30% |
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Vanderbilt (Owen) | 30% |
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SMU (Cox) | 30% |
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ESADE | 30% |
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New York (Stern) | 25% | |||
Michigan (Ross) | 25% |
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Notre Dame (Mendoza) | 25% | |||
Emory (Goizueta) | 25% |
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Maryland (Smith) | 25% |
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Georgetown (McDonough) | 25% |
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Oxford (Said) | 25% |
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Carnegie Mellon (Tepper) | 20% |
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USC (Marshall) | 20% |